by Ilan Stavans
A plan of la casa, recreated by architects Gustavo Castellón, Gilver Caraballo, and Jaime Santos, is in the town’s Casa Museo García Márquez. Looking at it, the structure of the Buendía home in One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes more concrete. It is located on Carrera 5, also known as Avenida del Monseñor Espejo, a street graced and perfumed by acacia and almond trees. Built on a rectangular piece of land, the house consists of three independent structures. To the left is García Márquez’s grandfather’s office. As one enters the building, there’s a patio that lies adjacent to a visitors’ room. Behind the grandfather’s office is a garden with a fragrant jasmine tree. Beyond the garden is the grandparents’ bedroom. There is also a pantry, the kitchen, and another patio. Then come a few surprises: a room containing statues of saints, a room for suitcases, a silversmithing workshop, a hallway flanked by two chestnut trees and filled with begonias, and a carpentry shop. I found the latrine at the back of the property.
One of the most stunning scenes in One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in chapter seven, when José Arcadio Buendía’s son, the eldest child and the sibling of Colonel José Arcadio Buendía and Amaranta, dies mysteriously. This remains one of the only—the only?—unsolved mysteries in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Expelled from the family home, José Arcadio Buendía moves into another house with Rebeca.26 One September afternoon, he comes home, greets Rebeca, who is taking a bath, goes to his room, and soon after a gunshot is heard. But when his mother, Úrsula, enters the room, she doesn’t find a weapon, nor does she find a wound on her son’s body. Immediately after the gunshot, a trickle of blood spills out from the victim onto the street. García Márquez’s description is superb:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a straight angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through a pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.27
In a 143-word segment (in the Spanish original the total is 149) that pays homage to the luminous imagery of French novelist Boris Vian, the victim’s blood goes from one end of town to the Buendía family home in search of its origins. Readers of the novel and visitors to the Casa Museo in Aracataca will note the accuracy with which García Márquez describes not only the town streets but each and every one of the rooms in the house. But what’s truly tantalizing is the metaphor built by the trickle of blood: unquestionably, in One Hundred Years of Solitude the house represents the foundation. And for the writer, the actual place where he spent his childhood is el origen.
It has been said that had García Márquez never left Aracataca in 1936, when his parents took him to live with them in Sucre, he would never have become a writer.28 By then his parents had had other children. His departure from the family home—and the enclosed environment in which he had been nurtured by his grandparents and the many women there—felt like a break. The house had allowed him to remain in his fantasy world within an adult habitat. His relationship with each of the people in the family home, and with the town as a whole, was seared in his mind forever. Leaving Aracataca was equivalent to being expelled from paradise.
Chapter 2
Apprenticeship
On November 9, 1929, García Márquez first visited Barranquilla—a major industrial port city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast with a population of approximately 250,000, where his parents were living at the time—to see his newborn sister Margot, the third child. He was only two years and eight months old, but he remembered the changing colors of the traffic lights. On December 17, 1930, his grandmother took him on his second trip to Barranquilla, where he met his second sister, Aida Rosa. Barranquilla was commemorating the centennial of Simón Bolívar’s death, and García Márquez recalled seeing a group of airplanes doing pirouettes in the sky, particularly a little black plane “como un gallinazo enorme,” like an enormous vulture, drawing circles in the air.
In 1934 his parents returned from Barranquilla to Aracataca to live with his maternal grandparents. Along came two more siblings, Margarita and Ligia. García Márquez’s parents were concerned about the parochial nature of the town’s school. He had gone to a Montessori school, where his teachers were nothing if not devoted and where he fell in love with reading. But Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga wanted their off-spring to have access to a better educational system, so they established themselves in Sucre. Eventually the family moved to Barranquilla’s Barrio Abajo neighborhood, where they lived from 1937 to 1939.
In school the boy fell in love with drawing. García Márquez would make doodles and show them to adults. One of his favorite books at the time was The 1001 Nights. When drilled by Father Angarita, who wanted to make sure the young didn’t waste their time on dull readings, García Márquez told him of his passion for this book. He had an uncensored adult edition that didn’t suppress “scabrous episodes.” “It surprised me to learn,” he later said, “that it was an important book, for I had always thought that serious adults could not believe that genies came out of bottles or doors opened at the incantation of magic words.”1
The importance of this Persian classic in his oeuvre cannot be overestimated. There are many connections between this anthology of folktales and stories and One Hundred Years of Solitude. The narrator of The 1001 Nights, Scheherazade—which in Persian means “townswoman”—must survive by telling a story to her husband, the sultan Shahryar, each night. The sultan has a penchant for killing spouses who don’t entertain him properly in the evening. There are similarities between Scheherazade and Melquíades, the Bedouin in García Márquez’s magnum opus, a larger-than-life, ghost-like character who dies only to come back again and who drafts the saga of the Buendía family in scrolls. His narrative foretells events and frames the genealogical epic within, roughly, a hundred years. Melquíades and the Wandering Jew are mythical figures who appear in the novel. García Márquez shaped his novel as a compendium of folktales. Different subplots acquire a life of their own as the overarching story unfolds, but they are all connected by the characters’ relationships with the Buendía family.
Another book that greatly influenced García Márquez at the time was the Bible. This was never fully acknowledged, given his anti-clerical views. But in a deeply Catholic country such as Colombia—notwithstanding its exposure to African culture brought to the Caribbean coast by the slave trade in the sixteenth century—biblical narratives are ubiquitous not only in Sunday sermons but in popular culture and other forums. There were constant biblical references in music, newspapers, and other media. Local politicians invoked characters from the Bible to make a critical point. This influence is important because One Hundred Years of Solitude is shaped like a Bible story, complete with natural disasters, famine, and wars. Incest is at the heart of the Buendía curse. That curse is behind the concept of the Chosen People: like the people of Israel after Abraham is called by God to leave his home in Genesis 12:1–2 in search for a new land where he will become the patriarch of a great nation, one susceptible to scorn, the Buendía family is destined for glory as well as infamy.
During that period García Márquez discovered other children’s stories that were typical of the reading of bookish boys and young adults: the folktales recounted by the Brothers Grimm, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, Around the World in Eighty Days and Voyage to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, and The Black Corsair, The Mystery of the Black Jungle, Sanmdoka the Great, The Tigers of Mompr
acem, and The Pirates of Malaysia by Emilio Salgari. Álvaro Mutis, García Márquez’s friend, whom he met in Barranquilla in 1949, often talked about finding the inspiration for his ubiquitous character, Maqroll el Gaviero (Maqroll the Lookout) in the adventure novels of Verne and Salgari, which he read as a young adult. Salgari also inspired other Latin American writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Carlos Fuentes. His anti-imperialist views likely resonated among Spanish-language authors who were wary of American influence in the Southern hemisphere. Salgari, unlike Verne, appears to have gone unnoticed in the United States.2
Then, of course, there was Don Quixote of La Mancha, a book to which García Márquez’s own masterpiece has often been compared, not because they are similar in plot or cast or characters but because each has come to be seen as a testament of the time in the Spanish-speaking world. The juxtaposition of reality and fiction is at the core of Cervantes’s two-part novel, originally published in 1605 and 1615, approximately three and a half centuries before One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez’s reading of it, in his own words, “always deserved a different chapter.” He had an instinctive dislike for the novel and he wasn’t shy about saying so. “The long learned speeches of the knight errant bored me, I did not find the stupidities of the squire all that amusing, and I even began to think it was not the same book that people talked so much about.”
But his secondary school teacher, Maestro Juan Ventura Cassalíns, had recommended it highly, and the respect García Márquez had for the teacher meant that he needed to give Don Quixote a second look. He did so, but felt as if he were swallowing it “like spoonsful of purgative.” García Márquez added: “I made other attempts in secondary school, where I was obliged to study it as a requirement, and I had an irremediable aversion to it until a friend advised me to put it on the back of the toilet and try to read it while I took care of my daily needs. Only in this way did I discover it, like a conflagration, and relish it forward and back until I could recite entire episodes by heart.”3
In 1939, the family moved to Sucre. A year later, García Márquez started middle school at the Colegio San José. It was at the heart of the city, adjacent to the church. He had lived away from his parents for the first eight years of his life and later while he was in high school, which meant that he was largely absent from the family household. This is how his siblings remembered him during that period. They received word of his interests, of who his friends were, but always from a distance. This remoteness would characterize his relationship with his family. They were constantly amazed by his achievements. In some instances this translated to devotion, while in others it generated envy. After he had achieved glory, he became a source of financial support for his family, at times buying someone an apartment or paying another’s medical bills.
As a child, García Márquez was curious. His transcripts from elementary and secondary school show an attentive student devoted to his courses. He was shy, taciturn even. He was known to have no interest in athletic activities. While at the Colegio San José, he met Juan B. Fernández Renowitsky, who would later become a prominent journalist and editor of El Heraldo. In 1941, García Márquez went home to Sucre because of health problems. Upon his return to the Colegio San José, he wrote his first narrative exercises for the school magazine, Juventud, a modest endeavor promoted by Jesuits to help students develop their talents.
The middle-class status of the García Márquezes, however, were at peril. The family was by that time in a deep financial crisis. Gabriel Eligio was barely able to make ends meet. This prompted García Márquez to return home once again in January 1943. He had two options: stay home with his six siblings or find a way to complete his high school education. He decided to travel to Bogotá with some letters of recommendation in hand to seek a scholarship from the Ministerio de Educación. He wanted to do his liceo, known elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world as bachillerato, the equivalent of high school, in the country’s capital. He felt he needed more space for himself and a chance to see the world from a broader perspective.
Bogotá, located almost at the geographic center of Colombia, generated in him both nervousness and anticipation. While there he received a scholarship to the prestigious all-boys school Liceo Nacional de Varones de Zipaquirá; it marked his rising status as a student.
Zipaquirá—in the Cundinamarca Department, some twenty to thirty miles from Bogotá but now considered part of the metropolitan area—was known for its salt reservoirs and grand cathedral. (The name Zipaquirá means in Chibcha, the language of the Muisca Indians, “The Land of the Zipa,” Zipa being the territory’s king.) It was there, in high school where García Márquez first reflected on political issues. Years later, he recalled that “the place was full of teachers who’d been taught by a Marxist in the Teachers Training College under President Alfonso López’s leftist government in the thirties. The algebra teacher would give us classes on historical materialism during break, the chemistry teacher would lend us books by Lenin and the history teacher would tell us about the class struggle. When I left that icy prison I had no idea where north and south were but I did have two very strong convictions. One was that good novels must be a poetic transposition of reality, and the other was that mankind’s immediate future lay in socialism.”4
During that period, García Márquez discovered the writers of the Spanish Golden Age, including Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Luis de Góngora y Argote, Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Henao, and Tirso de Molina. For centuries this literary constellation had exercised enormous influence on the Spanish Americas, establishing the way poetry was written, in a baroque, self-conscious style. He discovered their sonnets, villancicos, and redondillas and tried his hand at poetry. None of those early literary efforts survive.
Just as he was finishing high school (García Márquez graduated from the liceo at the age of nineteen on December 12, 1946),5 love struck during a ball in Sucre, where he met thirteen-year-old Mercedes Barcha Prado. Born in Magangué on November 6, 1932, Mercedes was the eldest daughter of a family of Mediterranean immigrants. Her great-grandfather was Syrian, and her grandfather was from Alexandria, Egypt. Her father was an Arab businessman who ran pharmacies and grocery stores. García Márquez asked Mercedes to marry him immediately after the ball, although the marriage would not take place until more than a decade later, after he had lived not only in other Colombian cities but in Rome, Paris, and London and had traveled extensively throughout Europe. Years later he told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “Looking back, I think the proposal was the metaphorical way of getting around all the fuss and bother you had to go through in those days to get a girlfriend.”6
Love is the quintessential ingredient in García Márquez’s oeuvre and it might well have been at that point, in his late teens, when he first recognized its depth and scope. “I believe one thing,” he told a reporter decades later in Havana, “all my life I have been a romantic. But in our society, once youth is gone, you are supposed to believe that romantic feeling is something reactionary and out of style. As time passes and I grew older, I came to realize how primordial these sentiments are, these feelings.”7
Mercedes was from the Bolívar Department, where the Roman Catholic Diocese has a see. It was one of the places where García Márquez’s father had been a telegraphist. Her Mediterranean beauty hypnotized him. He couldn’t stop dreaming about her. She reminded him of an Egyptian goddess, an image that long remained with him. In the eighteenth chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude he pays tangential tribute to Mercedes. The last Aureliano, after a long seclusion, leaves the house twice. On his second outing, “he had to go only a few blocks to reach a small pharmacy with dusty windows and ceramic bottles with labels in Latin where a girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile gave him the medicine the name of which José Arcadio had written down on a piece of paper.”8
According to transcripts dated February 25, 1947, García Márquez enrolled in the Universidad Naci
onal in Bogotá to study law. He did it mainly to please his parents. Coming as he did from a town of barely 20,000 people, the metropolis seemed colossal to him. But size wasn’t necessarily a synonym of depth. He perceived it as “a distant, gloomy city where an unrelenting drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century.” He told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that “the first thing I noticed about the somber capital was that there were too many men in too much of a hurry, that they all wore the same black suits and hats as I did, and that there wasn’t a woman to be seen. I noticed enormous Percherons drawing beer wagons in the rain, trams which gave off sparks like fireworks as they rounded the corners in the rain, and endless traffic jams for interminable funerals. These were the most lugubrious funerals in the world with grandiose ornate hearses and black horses decked out in velvet and black plumed nosebands, and corpses from important families who thought they had invented death.”9 In the seventh section of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez describes an army of lawyers all dressed in black suits who do little else but cater to the status quo.
Was García Márquez ready to become a lawyer? It is difficult to ascertain the extent of his commitment. His studies bored him to death. In Living to Tell the Tale, he quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Since very little I had to interrupt my education in order to go to school.” Judging from the recollections of his siblings, the exact sciences weren’t his forte.10
